Blood On the Hands of Obama’s Terror Associate

Barack
Obama was asked, during one of the Democratic presidential debates, about his
relationship with communist terrorist Bill Ayers. But the more controversial
relationship was with his wife, communist terrorist Bernardine Dohrn. Both were
present and hosted Obama when he launched a run for the Illinois State Senate.
In effect, Ayers and Dohrn sponsored Obama’s political career. But it has now
come to light that Dohrn repeatedly refused to deny credible reports that she
planted a bomb at a police station that killed a law enforcement officer.

Shouldn’t
Obama be asked about the reported involvement of his political associate in
cold-blooded murder?

This revelation is important because the Weather
Underground terrorists have long peddled the line that their bombings didn’t
kill anybody, except themselves. The book flap for Ayers’ book, Fugitive
Days, insists that the organization carried out “strategic, bloodless
bombings, including one inside the Pentagon.” This is a Big Lie.

The Legal Link

The ties
between Dohrn and Barack and Michelle Obama may run deep. From 1984-1988, Dohrn
worked at Sidley & Austin, a law firm, which is also where Obama and his
wife Michelle worked and met. “For three years after law school, Michelle
worked as an associate in the area of marketing and intellectual property at
Chicago law firm Sidley and Austin, where she met Barack Obama,” the official
Obama campaign website reports. But it says nothing about meeting or knowing
Dohrn.

Ayers had
told the New York Times—ironically in its edition of Sept. 11, 2001—“I feel we
didn’t do enough” in those days. It looks like Dohrn shares that view. Indeed,
a witness who questioned Dohrn tells AIM the onetime fugitive from justice
refused to deny she planted a bomb on the window ledge of a police station in San Francisco that killed
a policeman.

But she
has never been held accountable for this murder.

Newspaper
accounts at the time put the number of people wounded at nine. Riddled with
shrapnel, Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell died two days later at San Francisco General Hospital.
A memorial was held for him in February of 2007.

“Sergeant
McDonnell caught the full force of the flying shrapnel, which consisted of
heavy metal staples and lead bullets. As other officers tried rendering aid to
the fallen sergeant, they could see that he sustained a severed neck artery
wound and severe wounds to his eyes and neck,” the San Francisco Police
Officers Association Journal reports.

“Officers
[Ron] Martin and [Al] Arnaud, who were standing several feet from the window
ledge, were knocked to the ground and sustained injuries from the flying
glass,” it says. The blast caused them hearing impairment and shock. One
officer was knocked to the floor unconscious, while another “suffered multiple
severe wounds on his face, cheek and legs from the flying fragments of the
glass.”

The
original testimony about Dohrn’s involvement in this came during a hearing by
the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on October 18, 1974. On that date,
FBI undercover agent Larry Grathwohl testified at length on his penetration of
the Weathermen and how he learned firsthand of its violent aims on America.

Under
questioning from the panel’s veteran counsel J.G. “Jay” Sourwine, Grathwohl
testified that with the Weathermen, an offshoot of the Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS), “it was no longer a question of changing the system
from within. It was to destroy the system, completely destroy it, and that is what
they said the first time I met them, and that is what they said the last time I
was with them.”

Grathwohl
also testified about a specific bombing:

“When he
[Bill Ayers] returned, we had another meeting at which time—and this is the
only time that any Weathermen told me about something that someone else had
done—and Bill started off telling us about the need to raise the level of the
struggle and for stronger leadership inside the Weathermen ‘focals’ [cells] and
inside the Weatherman organization as a whole. And [what] he cited as one of
the real problems was that someone like Bernardine Dohrn had to plan, develop
and carry out the bombing of the police station in San Francisco, and he specifically named her
as the person that committed that act.”

Grathwohl
added that Ayers “said that the bomb was placed on the window ledge and he
described the kind of bomb that was used to the extent of saying what kind of
shrapnel was used in it.”

He was
asked, “Did he say who placed the bomb on the window ledge?” He replied,
“Bernardine Dohrn.”

Asked
if Ayers said that he had personally witnessed Dohrn placing the bomb,
Grathwohl responded, “Well, if he wasn’t there to see it, somebody who was
there told him about it, because he stated it very emphatically.”

This
testimony completely obliterates the notion, perpetuated by the Chicago Tribune
and other media, that the bombings only killed the bombers themselves. Such
propaganda is designed to play down the serious nature of the terrorist crimes
and make Obama’s relationship with Ayers and Dohrn more palatable.

Ayers
Praised Dohrn

Grathwohl
includes this conversation with Ayers in his 1976 book, Bringing Down America:
An FBI Informer with the Weathermen. The park police station bombing in San Francisco was “a
success,” Ayers is quoted as saying, “but it’s a shame when someone like
Bernardine Dohrn has to make all the plans, make the bomb, and then place it
herself. She should have to do only the planning.”

What a
shame that Dohrn had to do all the dirty work. But it’s probably safe to assume
that Ayers either helped her or knew about it in advance.

Grathwohl
reveals that Ayers himself knew how to make bombs and didn’t care about people
being killed. At one point, he says, Ayers displayed a diagram of a bomb, with
dynamite and a fuse. The plan was to bomb a police station but an objection was
raised that it would also destroy a nearby restaurant. “We’ll blow out the Red
Barn restaurant,” Grathwohl said. “Maybe even kill a few innocent customers—and most of them are black.”

“We can’t
protect all the innocent people in the world,” Ayers replied. “Some will get
killed. Some of us will get killed. We have to accept that fact.”

Grathwohl
says the Weather Under-ground (WUO) also considered using kidnappings and
assassinations in order to bring about their communist revolution in the U.S.
Possible kidnapping targets were Vice President Spiro Agnew and presidential
aide Henry Kissinger.

The KU Appearance

The Monday
March 8, 1982 edition of The University Daily Kansan, the student newspaper
of the University
of Kansas, ran a story
about the campus appearance the previous Friday of Bernadine Dohrn. She
declared, “Those of us who participated in the [Vietnam] anti-war movement were not
drastic enough.”

Considering
the testimony that she was responsible for planting the bomb in San Francisco on Feb. 16,
1970 that killed Police Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell, who caught the full force of
the flying shrapnel, one wonders what would qualify as “drastic enough.”

AIM has
been in contact with a witness to the events of the day of Dohrn’s 1982
appearance on the KU campus. John B. Barrett, then a third semester law student
at the university, showed up at the meeting where Dohrn was speaking against
the war then in El Salvador.
That was at a time when a Soviet-backed insurgency was out to take over that
beleaguered country. President Reagan’s determination not to let the Soviets
gain one square inch of territory on his watch was instrumental in putting the
kibosh on that aggression. Reagan had a policy of supporting the government of El Salvador.

As Barrett
(now a practicing attorney in Goddard, Kansas) e-mailed this writer, “Using Larry Grathwohl’s
testimony, and a pamphlet by ex-FBI agents, I asked Dohrn how she could condemn
killing by the U.S.
government when she had killed one police officer and injured others. Her
response was, ‘Larry’s a pig.’ I asked about the incident at least two more
times, and got the same response each time.” Through it all, as Barrett tells
us, Dohrn’s two male companions tried to shout him down; Dohrn told them to let
him speak.

And then
this:

“DOHRN
NEVER SAID THAT GRATHWOHL HAD LIED OR DENIED THAT SHE HAD PLANNED AND CARRIED
OUT THE BOMBING THAT KILLED THE OFFICER IN SAN FRANCISCO [Caps in original
e-mail].”

During her
appearance at KU, Dohrn also alleged that the U.S. government “is the main enemy
of the people of the world” and that “Resorting to violence is painful and
tragic, but with a slave/master situation, something has to be done.”

The Manson Murders

Not so coincidentally,
members of the SDS such as Ayers and Dohrn were becoming members of the Weather
Underground and engaging in numerous bombings and other violence as the case of
Charles Manson and his “family” emerged in 1969. Manson had taken a group of
young people, subjected them to heavy drug use, and ordered them to commit mass
murder. On the Weather Underground and their drug use, Ayers writes in his own
book, Fugitive Days, “Marijuana was available everywhere—every party,
every gathering, every meeting.”

Dohrn
went further, praising the psychopath Manson as a true “revolutionary,” adding,
“First they killed those pigs [i.e., the victims, including a pregnant movie
actress], then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even
shoved a fork into one’s stomach. Wild.”

In her
“Declaration of a State of War,”
Dohrn said, “We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws
against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually
split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.”

The
pro-Manson comments were delivered by Dohrn at a national SDS “War Council” in
December of 1969. Those in attendance included SDS leader Mark Rudd, who also
gave a speech. Rudd was a subject of an April 27, 2008, sympathetic article in
the Washington Post about a “Columbia 68” “reunion” of SDS members and
student radicals who had taken over campus buildings. Lee Bollinger, president
of Columbia and
a board member of the Post, delivered a welcoming address and participated in a
panel discussion.

The Post
article about the event neglected to mention that Rudd had been to Communist
Cuba before he led the riots and the takeover of Columbia University.
Rudd wrote an SDS pamphlet, titled simply Columbia, which declared that during the “occupation” of Columbia University,
“It was no accident that we hung up pictures of Karl Marx and Malcom X and Che
Guevara and flew red flags from the tops of two buildings.” The pamphlet
concluded with a quotation from Communist Chinese mass murderer Mao Tse-Tung,
“Dare to struggle, dare to win.”

The Dohrn-Soros
Connection

Dohrn is
now a Clinical Associate Professor in the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern
School of Law and an adjunct faculty member of the University of
Illinois/Chicago in the Department of Criminal Justice. Her curriculum vitae
shows participation in several American Bar Association (ABA) events and even a
Department of Justice conference. She was involved in a “Peace Studies Program”
at Colgate University
and served on the board of the “Peace Museum” in Chicago,
an entity currently funded by the Playboy Foundation.

Most
interesting, however, are her appearances at events sponsored by the Open
Society Institute (OSI) of billionaire leftist George Soros. The Baltimore, Maryland
branch of the OSI on May 12, 2004, hosted Dohrn at a forum on criminal justice
issues and discipline in schools. In 1999, Dohrn participated in an OSI
event at New York
University on “families
in a free society,” with a focus on welfare reform and child welfare. (Another
WUO member, Linda Evans, was given a Soros grant to “increase civic
participation of former prisoners.”)

An objective observer might conclude that
Ayers, Dohrn and their comrades are now dedicated to creating a new student and
youth movement, like the one they participated in which eventually developed
into a full-blown terrorist organization that killed our fellow citizens and
tried to eliminate the “Thin Blue Line” of police separating us from the
criminals. In this new crusade, they not only have an inspiring leader,
Barack Obama, who attracts young people with his promise of “change,” but a
moneybags named Soros, who has funded causes such as rights for convicted
felons and legalization of dope.

“I have very high regard for Hillary Clinton,
but I think Obama has the charisma and the vision to radically reorient America in the
world,” Soros told Judy Woodruff of Bloomberg Television. “I think that he has
shown to be a really unusual person.”

Where’s The Justice?

So how do
communist-backed terror bombers escape justice for their crimes and end up
introducing Barack Obama to the wider world of American politics?

To answer
that, one must recall the post-Watergate anti-intelligence culture that began
in the Ford years and accelerated in the Carter administration, in which
concern over a huge slave empire’s drive for world domination was deemed “an
inordinate fear of communism,” to quote Jimmy Carter.

Roy M.
Cohn, best known as chief counsel to the old McCarthy committee, captured the
tenor of the times:

“During
the 1970s, the American internal security and counter-intelligence community
[including congressional committees investigating communism] was virtually
destroyed….by a sensation-seeking national media which utilized selective
“leaks” and disclosures in order to present a bizarre, distorted picture of the
purpose and operations of the intelligence, counter-intelligence and internal
security agencies.”

In those years, the FBI’s hands were tied
by such prohibitions as being forbidden to clip news stories of subversive
activities or building a file on individual subversives and terrorists.
Meanwhile, the anti-intelligence lobby was going full tilt. Groups such as the
communist-front National Lawyers Guild, and the pro-Marxist Institute for Policy
Studies worked openly with the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Carter Justice Department prosecuted FBI agents Mark
Felt (later revealed as “Deep Throat” in the Watergate case) and Edward S.
Miller who were in pursuit of radicals in the Weather Underground (the renamed
Weathermen) who had planted bombs not only in San Francisco but in New York,
Los Angeles and in Washington at the U.S. Capitol and other federal buildings.

It was left to President Reagan to pardon the agents. He
declared:

“During their long careers,
Mark Felt and Edward Miller served the Federal Bureau of Investigation and our
nation with great distinction. To punish them further—after 3 years of criminal
prosecution proceedings— would not serve the ends of justice.

“Their
convictions in the U.S. District Court, on appeal at the time I signed the
pardons, grew out of their good-faith belief that their actions were necessary
to preserve the security interests of our country. The record demonstrates that
they acted not with criminal intent, but in the belief that they had grants of
authority reaching to the highest levels of government.

“America was at war in 1972, and Messrs. Felt and
Miller followed procedures they believed essential to keep the Director of the
FBI, the Attorney General, and the President of the United States advised of the
activities of hostile foreign powers and their collaborators in this
country…”

One
argument used by the defendants (and not contradicted) was that the Weather
Underground was taking orders and direction from Castro’s Cuba.

The Cuban Connection

Herbert Romerstein, former investigator for the House
Committee on Un-American Activities and the House Internal Security Committee,
has said that “What is significant today are the neo-communists—many of them
are what we call red diaper babies and they came out of communist families. But
they were disappointed in the Soviet Union
back in the 1960’s and 1970’s and they were disappointed that the American
Communist Party was so weak. So, they said they were communists and they were
better communists than the American Communist Party. I think a better term for people like Bill
Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are neo-communists.
They were not party members, but they were fighting on behalf of the
countries that the Soviet Union controlled or
created.”

Romerstein
noted that “A group of the Weathermen went down to Cuba in the so-called Venceremos
Brigade, and some of them received training in terrorist activities.

“One of
their instructors was named Julian Torres-Rizo. Rizo was an officer of the
Cuban DGI, the intelligence service. He was assigned to work with the young
Americans who were coming down ostensibly to cut sugar cane. They were really
coming down for training. And we have one of Rizo’s speeches in which he says,
‘You come from a society that must be destroyed. It’s your job to destroy your
society.’

“Well,
Bernardine Dohrn and her cronies published Rizo’s speech and I have the copy
that they published so we know what he did and what they said. And Rizo later
became the Cuban Ambassador to Grenada at the time of Maurice Bishop and he was
still the Cuban Ambassador when Bishop was murdered by his own comrades and
finally had to leave and go back to Cuba where he became a member of the
central committee of the Cuban Communist Party.

“He’s a
very significant communist apparatchik and he was a tremendous influence on the
Weather Underground…he helped the terrorists that were fighting against us at
that time.”